| Fragments of the nuclear-industrial infrastructure of the Manhattan Project (1943-1946) and Cold War era (1946-1990) persist in various stages of re- and de-construction in locations across the United States. A number of these nuclear facilities – Department of Energy (DOE) uranium enrichment and weapons technology plants – have attracted efforts to interpret their historical significance through monuments, museums, and visitors centers. In some cases they are transitioning into commemorative sites where landscape, artifacts, and documents, produce site-specific multi-media museums and monuments. The complex and controversial nature of nuclear technology has summoned likewise complex and controversial interpretive technologies. As performance sites, and as mediasaturated sites, they are often designed with the intention not to foreground the very dramaturgical elements on which their ability to construct historical narratives depends. The relation between the history of the sites and the history they present makes them examples of complex site-specific performances of history – which embed spectators in a performance of multiple semiotic levels and symbolic structures, some of which are designed specifically to disappear behind the museum's stagecraft.;This study asks, how do these commemorative and historical sites of nuclear or “atomic” tourism perform as both entertainment and documentation? How do they take into account the elements of affect and nostalgia which are inherent in such projects? The study concludes that once the landscape has been marked and re-marked as historical, and interfaced with an interpretive structure such as a museum or monument, it becomes a complex form of media. Given the historical significance of these sites of both weapons and energy production, interpreting their past holds great importance for grasping their significance in situ, before they are understood, framed, and captured, merely as heritage – as nuclear or “atomic” tourism. |
